are political parties with ering aims, so sets,

cliques, gangs, corporations, partnerships,

groups bound closely together by ties of blood,
and so on in endless variety. In many modern
states and in some ancient, there is great
diversity of populations, of varying languages,
religions, moral codes, and traditions. From this
standpoint, many a minor political unit, one of
our large cities, for example, is a congeries of
loosely associated societies, rather than an
inclusive and permeating community of action
and thought. (See ante, p. 20.)
The terms society, community, are thus
ambiguous. They have both a eulogistic or
normative sense, and a descriptive sense; a
meaning de jure and a meaning de facto. In
social philosophy, the former connotation is
almost always uppermost. Society is conceived
as one by its very nature. The qualities which
accompany this unity, praiseworthy community
of purpose and welfare, loyalty to public ends,
mutuality of sympathy, are emphasized. But
when we look at the facts which the term
denotes instead of confining our attention to its
intrinsic connotation, we find not unity, but a
plurality of societies, good and bad. Men banded
together in a criminal conspiracy, business
aggregations that prey upon the public while
serving it, political machines held together by
the interest of plunder, are included. If interests
as a factor in social control. The second means
not only freer interaction between social groups
(once isolated so far as intention could keep up a
separation) but change in social habit— its
continuous readjustment through meeting the
new situations produced by varied intercourse.
And these two traits are precisely what
characterize the democratically constituted
society.
Upon the educational side, we note first that
the realization of a form of social life in which
interests are mutually interpenetrating, and
where progress, or readjustment, is an important
consideration, makes a democratic community
more interested than other communities have
cause to be in deliberate and systematic
education. The devotion of democracy to
education is a familiar fact. The superficial
explanation is that a government resting upon
popular suffrage cannot be successful unless
those who elect and who obey their governors
are educated. Since a democratic society
repudiates the principle of external authority, it
must find a substitute in voluntary disposition
and interest; these can be created only by
education. But there is a deeper
explanation. A democracy is more than a
form of government; it is primarily a mode
of associated living, of conjoint
communicated experience. The
following nature was a political dogma. It meant a
rebellion against existing social institutions, customs,
and ideals (See ante, p. 91). Rousseau's statement
that everything is good as it comes from the hands of
the Creator has its signification only in its contrast
with the concluding part of the same sentence:
"Everything degenerates in the hands of man." And
again he says: "Natural man has an absolute value; he
is a numerical unit, a complete integer and has no
relation save to himself and to his fellow man.
Civilized man is only a relative unit, the numerator of a
fraction whose value depends upon its dominator, its
relation to the integral body of society. Good political
institutions are those which make a man unnatural." It
is upon this conception of the artificial and harmful
character of organized social life as it now exists 2 that
he rested the notion that nature not merely furnishes
prime forces which initiate growth but also its plan
and goal. That evil institutions and customs work
almost automatically to give a wrong education which
the most careful schooling cannot offset is true
enough; but the conclusion is not to education apart
from the environment, but to provide an environment
in which native powers will be put to better uses.

AM Chaptg
 2. Social Efficiency as Aim. A conception which made
nature supply the end of a true education and society the
end of an evil one, could hardly

07:56 Nine Natw.y as Aims (12/21) 26.7%

intellectual opportunities are accessible to all on
equable and easy terms. A society marked off
into classes need he specially attentive only to
the education of its ruling elements. A society
which is mobile, which is frill of channels for the
distribution of a change occurring anywhere,
must see to it that its members are educated to
personal initiative and adaptability. Otherwise,
they will be overwhelmed by the changes in
which they are caught and whose significance or
connections they do not perceive. The result will
be a confusion in which a few will appropriate to
themselves the results of the blind and
externally directed activities of others.

3. The Platonic Educational Philosophy.

Subsequent chapters will be devoted to making
explicit the implications of the democratic ideas
in education. In the remaining portions of this
chapter, we shall consider the educational
theories which have been evolved in three
epochs when the social import of education was
especially conspicuous. The first one to be
considered is that of Plato. No one could better
express than did he the fact that a society is
stably organized when each individual is doing
that for which he has aptitude by nature in such
a way as to be useful to others (or to contribute
to the whole to which he belongs); and that it is
the business of education to discover these
aptitudes and progressively to train them for
social use.

AM Chaptg
{0 07:43 Seven: The..Education (12/30) 23.4%
assimilation of new presentations, their
character is all important. The effect of new
presentations is to reinforce groupings
previously formed. The business of the educator
is, first, to select the proper material in order to
fix the nature of the original reactions, and,
secondly, to arrange the sequence of
subsequent presentations on the basis of the
store of ideas secured by prior transactions. The
control is from behind, from the past, instead of,
as in the unfolding conception, in the ultimate
goal.

(3) Certain formal steps of all method in

teaching may be laid down. Presentation of new
subject matter is obviously the central thing, but
since knowing consists in the way in which this
interacts with the contents already submerged
below consciousness, the first thing is the step of
"preparation,"—that is, calling into special
activity and getting above the floor of
consciousness those older presentations which
are to assimilate the new one. Then after the
presentation, follow the processes of interaction
of new and old; then comes the application of
the newly formed content to the performance of
some task. Everything must go through this
course; consequently there is a perfectly
uniform method in instruction in all subjects for
all pupils of all ages.

AM Chapter
 Herbart's great service lay in taking the work
of teaching out of the region of routine and
accident.

07:37 Sx: (3/18) 22.3%

control. To say that one knows what he is about,
or can intend certain consequences, is to say, of
course, that he can better anticipate what is
going to happen; that he can, therefore, get
ready or prepare in advance so as to secure
beneficial consequences and avert undesirable
ones. A genuinely educative experience, then,
one in which instruction is conveyed and ability
increased, is contradistinguished from a routine
activity on one hand, and a capricious activity on
the other. (a) In the latter one "does not care
what happens"; one just lets himself go and
avoids connecting the consequences of one's act
(the evidences of its connections with other
things) with the act. It is customary to frown
upon such aimless random activity, treating it as
willful mischief or carelessness or lawlessness.
But there is a tendency to seek the cause of such
aimless activities in the youth's own disposition,
isolated from everything else. But in fact such
activity is explosive, and due to maladjustment
with surroundings. Individuals act capriciously
whenever they act under external dictation, or
from being told, without having a purpose of
their own or perceiving the bearing of the deed
upon other acts. One may learn by doing
something which he does not understand; even
AM Chaptg
in the most intelligent action, we do much which
we do not mean, because the largest portion of
the connections of the act we consciously intend
are not perceived or anticipated. But we learn
only

CO 07:40 Six: Educa„rogressive (15/18) 22.8%

AM Chapter
NOW tor that ot discipline. Where an activity
takes time, where many means and obstacles lie
between its initiation and completion,
deliberation and persistence are required. It is
obvious that a very large part of the everyday
meaning of will is precisely the deliberate or
conscious disposition to persist and endure in a
planned course of action in spite of difficulties
and contrary solicitations. A man of strong will,
in the popular usage of the words, is a man who
is neither fickle nor half-hearted in achieving
chosen ends. His ability is executive; that is, he
persistently and energetically strives to execute
or carry out his aims. A weak will is unstable as
water.

Clearly there are two factors in will. One has to

do with the foresight ofresults, the other with
the depth of hold the foreseen outcome has
upon the person.

(I) Obstinacy is persistence but it is not

strength of volition. Obstinacy may be mere
animal inertia and insensitiveness. A man keeps
on doing a thing just because he has got started,
not because of any clearly thought-out purpose.
In fact, the obstinate man generally declines
(although he may not be quite aware of his
refusal) to make clear to himself what his
proposed end is; he has a feeling that ifhe
allowed himself to get a clear and full idea of it,
it might not be worth while. Stubbornness shows
itself even more in
{8 08:00 AM Ten: Intere„d Discipline (7/23) 28.8%
external; they are shifting things about. No ideal
reward, no enrichment of emotion and intellect,
accompanies them. Others contribute to the
maintenance of life, and to its external
adornment and display. Many of our existing
social activities, industrial and political, fall in
these two classes. Neither the people who
engage in them, nor those who are directly
affected by them, are capable of full and free
interest in their work. Because of the lack of any
purpose in the work for the one doing it, or
because of the restricted character ofits aim,
intelligence is not adequately engaged. The
same conditions force many people back upon
themselves. They take refuge in an inner play of
sentiment and fancies. They are aesthetic but
not artistic, since their feelings and ideas are
turned upon themselves, instead of being
methods in acts which modify conditions. Their
mental life is sentimental; an enjoyment of an
inner landscape. Even the pursuit of science may
become an asylum ofrefuge from the hard
conditions of life— not a temporary retreat for
the sake of recuperation and clarification in
future dealings with the world. The very word
art may become associated not with specific
transformation of things, making them more
significant for mind, but with stimulations of
eccentric fancy and with emotional indulgences.
The separation and mutual contempt of the
"practical" man and the man of theory or
culture, the divorce of fine and industrial arts,
are indications of this situation.

{B 08:04 AM Ten: (20/23) 29.4%

only get rid of the artificial man-imposed
coercive restrictions.
Education in accord with nature was thought to
be the first step in insuring this more social
society. It was plainly seen that economic and
political limitations were ultimately dependent
upon limitations of thought and feeling. The first
step in freeing men from external chains was to
emancipate them from the internal chains of false
beliefs and ideals. What was called social life,
existing institutions, were too false and corrupt to
be intrusted with this work. How could it be
expected to undertake it when the undertaking
meant its own destruction? "Nature" must then be
the power to which the enterprise was to be left.
Even the extreme sensationalistic theory of
knowledge which was current derived itself from
this conception. To insist that mind is originally
passive and empty was one way of glorifying the
possibilities of education. If the mind was a wax
tablet to be written upon by objects, there were
no limits to the possibility of education by means
of the natural environment. And since the natural
world of objects is a scene of harmonious "truth,"
this education would infallibly produce minds
filled with the truth.
5. Education as National and as Social. As soon
as the first enthusiasm for freedom waned, the

{0 07:46 AM Chapter Seven: The..Education (20/30)

weakness of the theory upon the constructive side
became obvious. Merely to leave everything to

23.7%
ground that life and instinct are a kind of
miraculous thing anyway. Thus we fail to note
what the essential characteristic of the event is;
namely, the significance of the temporal place
and order of each element; the way each prior
event leads into its successor while the
successor takes up what is furnished and utilizes
it for some other stage, until we arrive at the
end, which, as it were, summarizes and finishes
off the process. Since aims relate always to
results, the first thing to look to when it is a
question of aims, is whether the work assigned
possesses intrinsic continuity. Or is it a mere
serial aggregate of acts, first doing one thing and
then another? To talk about an educational aim
when approximately each act of a pupil is
dictated by the teacher, when the only order in
the sequence of his acts is that which comes
from the assignment of lessons and the giving of
directions by another, is to talk nonsense. It is
equally fatal to an aim to permit capricious or
discontinuous action in the name of
spontaneous self-expression. An aim implies an
orderly and ordered activity, one in which the
order consists in the progressive completing of a
process. Given an activity having a time span and
cumulative growth within the time succession,
an aim means foresight in advance of the end or
possible termination. If bees anticipated the
consequences of their activity, if they perceived
their end in imaginative foresight, they would
have the primary element in an aim. Hence it is
nonsense

Cžï-) 07:49 AM 1. The Nature of an Aim. (3/18) 24.8%

thoroughgoing "disciplinary" subordination to
existing institutions. The extent of the
transformation of educational philosophy which
occurred in Germany in the generation occupied
by the struggle against Napoleon for national
independence, may be gathered from Kant, who
well expresses the earlier individualcosmopolitan
ideal. In his treatise on Pedagogics, consisting of
lectures given in the later years of the eighteenth
century, he defines education as the process by
which man becomes man. Mankind begins its
history submerged in nature— not as Man who is
a creature of reason, while nature furnishes only
instinct and appetite. Nature offers simply the
germs which education is to develop and perfect.
The peculiarity of truly human life is that man
has to create himself by his own voluntary
efforts; he has to make himself a truly moral,
rational, and free being. This creative effort is
carried on by the educational activities of slow
generations. Its acceleration depends upon men
consciously striving to educate their successors
not for the existing state of affairs but so as to
make possible a future better humanity. But there
is the great difficulty. Each generation is inclined
to educate its young so as to get along in the
present world instead of with a view to the proper

{0 07:46 AM Chapter Seven: The..Education (20/30)

end of education: the promotion of the best
possible realization of humanity as humanity.
Parents educate their children so that they may
get on; princes educate

23.9%
reluctance to criticize ends which present
themselves than it does in persistence and
energy in use of means to achieve the end. The
really executive man is a man who ponders his
ends, who makes his ideas of the results of his
actions as clear and full as possible. The people
we called weak-willed or self-indulgent always
deceive themselves as to the consequences of
their acts. They pick out some feature which is
agreeable and neglect all attendant
circumstances. When they begin to act, the
disagreeable results they ignored begin to show
themselves. They are discouraged, or complain
of being thwarted in their good purpose by a
hard fate, and shift to some other line of action.
That the primary difference between strong and
feeble volition is intellectual, consisting in the
degree of persistent firmness and fullness with
which consequences are thought out, cannot be
over-emphasized.
(ii) There is, of course, such a thing as a
speculative tracing out of results. Ends are then
foreseen, but they do not lay deep hold of a
person. They are something to look at and for
curiosity to play with rather than something to
achieve. There is no such thing as
overintellectuality, but there is such a thing as a
onesided intellectuality. A person "takes it out"
as we say in considering the consequences of
proposed lines of action. A certain flabbiness of
fiber prevents the contemplated object from
08:00 AM Ten: (8/23)
gripping him and engaging him in action. And
most

{8 Intere„d Discipline 28.8%

situation of human intercourse. On the one hand,
science, commerce, and art transcend national
boundaries. They are largely international in
quality and method. They involve
interdependencies and cooperation among the
peoples inhabiting different countries. At the
same time, the idea of national sovereignty has
never been as accentuated in politics as it is at the
present time. Each nation lives in a state of
suppressed hostility and incipient war with its
neighbors. Each is supposed to be the supreme
judge of its own interests, and it is assumed as
matter of course that each has interests which are
exclusively its own. To question this is to
question the very idea of national sovereignty
which is assumed to be basic to political practice
and political science. This contradiction (for it is
nothing less) between the wider sphere of
associated and mutually helpful social life and
the narrower sphere of exclusive and hence
potentially hostile pursuits and purposes, exacts
of educational theory a clearer conception of the
meaning of "social" as a function and test of
education than has yet been attained. Is it
possible for an educational system to be
conducted by a national state and yet the frill
social ends of the educative process not be
restricted, constrained, and corrupted? Internally,
08:03 AM Ten: (13/23)
the question has to face the tendencies, due to
present economic conditions, which split society
into classes some of which are made merely tools
for the higher

24.1%
indifferently and miscellaneously to any and
every detail. It is centered upon whatever has a
bearing upon the effective pursuit of your
occupation. Your look is ahead, and you are
concerned to note the existing facts because and
in so far as they are factors in the achievement
of the result intended. You have to find out what
your resources are, what conditions are at
command, and what the difficulties and
obstacles are. This foresight and this survey with
reference to what is foreseen constitute mind.
Action that does not involve such a forecast of
results and such an examination of means and
hmdrances is either a matter of habit or else it is
blind. In neither case is it intelligent. To be vague
and uncertain as to what is intended and
careless in observation of conditions of its
realization is to be, in that degree, stupid or
partially intelligent.

If we recur to the case where mind is not

concerned with the physical manipulation of the
instruments but with what one intends to write,
the case is the same. There is an activity in
process; one is taken up with the development

{0 07:46 AM Chapter Seven: The..Education (20/30)

of a theme. Unless one writes as a phonograph
talks, this means intelligence; namely, alertness
in foreseeing the various conclusions to which
present data and considerations are tending,
together with continually renewed observation
and recollection to get hold of the subject
matter which bears upon the conclusions to be
reached.

Chaptg Interes„Discipline 29.0%

08:03 AM Ten: (13/23)

 The account of education given in our earlier
chapters virtually anticipated the results reached
in a discussion of the purport of education in a
democratic community. For it assumed that the
aim of education is to enable individuals to
continue their education—or that the object and
reward of learning is continued capacity for
growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all
the members of a society except where
intercourse of man with man is mutual, and
except where there is adequate provision for the
reconstruction of social habits and institutions
by means of wide stimulation arising from
equitably distributed interests. And this means a
democratic society. In our search for aims in
education, we are not concerned, therefore,
with finding an end outside of the educative
process to which education is subordinate. Our
whole conception forbids. We are rather
concerned with the contrast which exists when
aims belong within the process in which they
operate and when they are set up from without.
And the latter state of affairs must obtain when
social relationships are not equitably balanced.
For in that case, some portions of the whole
social group will find their aims determined by
an external dictation; their aims will not arise
from the free growth of their own experience,
and their nominal aims will be means to more
ulterior ends of others rather than truly their
own.
07:48 AM
 i. The Natureof an Airw (1/18) 24.3%
combination of the two. Subject matter is then
regarded as something complete in itself; it is just
something to be learned or known, either by the
voluntary application of mind to it or through the
impressions it makes on mind.
The facts of interest show that these
conceptions are mythical. Mind appears in
experience as ability to respond to present stimuli
on the basis of anticipation of future possible
consequences, and with a view to controlling the
kind of consequences that are to take place. The
things, the subject matter known, consist of
whatever is recognized as having a bearing upon
the anticipated course of events, whether
assisting or retarding it. These statements are too
formal to be very intelligible. An illustration may
clear up their significance. You are engaged in a
certain occupation, say writing with a typewriter.
If you are an expert, your formed habits take care
of the physical movements and leave your
thoughts free to consider your topic. Suppose,
however, you are not skilled, or that, even if you
are, the machine does not work well. You then
have to use intelligence. You do not wish to
strike the keys at random and let the
consequences be what they may; you wish to
record certain words in a given order so as to
make sense. You attend to the keys, to what you
have written, to your movements, to the ribbon or
the mechanism of the machine. Your attention is
not distributed

08:03 AM Ten: (13/23)

CO 29.0%
because after the act is performed we note results
which we had not noted before. But much work
in school consists in setting up rules by which
pupils are to act of such a sort that even after
pupils have acted, they are not led to see the
connection between the result—say the answer—
and the method pursued. So far as they are
concerned, the whole thing is a trick and a Idnd
of miracle. Such action is essentially capricious,
and leads to capricious habits. (b) Routine action,
action which is automatic, may increase skill to
do a particular thing. In so far, it might be said to
have an educative effect. But it does not lead to
new perceptions of bearings and connections; it
limits rather than widens the meaning-horizon.
And since the environment changes and our way
of acting has to be modified in order successfully
to keep a balanced connection with things, an
isolated uniform way of acting becomes
disastrous at some critical moment. The vaunted
"skill" turns out gross ineptitude.
The essential contrast of the idea of education
as continuous reconstruction with the other
onesided conceptions which have been criticized
in this and the previous chapter is that it
identifies the end (the result) and the process.
This is verbally self-contradictory, but only
verbally. It means that experience as an active
process occupies time and that its later period
07:48 AM
completes its earlier portion; it brings to light
connections

CO Chapter Six: Educa„rogressive (16/18) 22.8%

08:03 AM Ten: (13/23)

But the idea which underlies it is that education
is essentially retrospective; that it looks primarily
to the past and especially to the literary products
of the past, and that mind is adequately formed in
the degree in which it is patterned upon the
spiritual heritage of the past. This idea has had
such immense influence upon higher instruction
especially, that it is worth examination in its
extreme formulation.
In the first place, its biological basis is
fallacious. Embyronic growth ofthe human infant
preserves, without doubt, some of the traits of
lower forms of life. But in no respect is it a strict
traversing of past stages. If there were any strict
"law" of repetition, evolutionary development
would clearly not have taken place. Each new
generation would simply have repeated its
predecessors' existence. Development, in short,
has taken place by the entrance of shortcuts and
alterations in the prior scheme of growth. And
this suggests that the aim of education is to
facilitate such short£ircuited growth. The great
advantage of immaturity, educationally speaking,
is that it enables us to emancipate the young from
the need of dwelling in an outgrown past. The
business of education is rather to liberate the
young from reviving and retraversing the past
than to lead them to a recapitulation of it. The
social environment of the young is constituted by
the presence and action of the habits of thinking
 07:38 AM Sx: (7/18) 224%
there is a disposition to take considerations
which are dear to the hearts of adults and set
them up as ends irrespective of the capacities of
those educated. There is also an inclination to
propound aims which are so uniform as to
neglect the specific powers and requirements of
an individual, forgetting that all learning is
something which happens to an individual at a
given time and place. The larger range of
perception of the adult is of great value in
observing the abilities and weaknesses of the
young, in deciding what they may amount to.
Thus the artistic capacities of the adult exhibit
what certain tendencies of the chÐd are capable
of; if we did not have the adult achievements we
should be without assurance as to the
significance of the drawing, reproducing,
modeling, coloring activities of childhood. So if
it were not for adult language, we should not be
able to see the import of the babbling impulses of
infancy. But it is one thing to use adult
accomplishments as a context in which to place
and survey the doings of childhood and youth; it
is quite another to set them up as a fixed aim
without regard to the concrete activities of those
educated.
(2) An aim must be capable of translation into
a method of cooperating with the activities of
those undergoing instruction. It must suggest the
kind of environment needed to liberate and to
organize their capacities. Unless it lends itself to
the

07:51 AM 1. The Natureof an Aim. (14/18) 25.3%

And it is well to remind ourselves that
education as such has no aims. Only persons,
parents, and teachers, etc., have aims, not an
abstract idea like education. And consequently
their purposes are indefinitely varied, differing
with different children, changing as chfldren
grow and with the growth of experience on the
part of the one who teaches. Even the most valid
aims which can be put in words will, as words,
do more harm than good unless one recognizes
that they are not aims, but rather suggestions to
educators as to how to observe, how to look
ahead, and how to choose in liberating and
directing the energies of the concrete situations in
which they find themselves. As a recent writer
has said: 'To lead this boy to read Scott's novels
instead of old Sleuth's stories; to teach this girl to
sew; to root out the habit of bullying from John's
make-up; to prepare this class to study medicine,
—these are samples of the millions of aims we
have actually before us in the concrete work of
education." Bearing these qualifications in mind,
we shall proceed to state some of the
characteristics found in all good educational
aims. (1) An educational aim must be founded
upon the intrinsic activities and needs (including
original instincts and acquired habits) of the
given individual to be educated. The tendency of
such an aim as preparation is, as we have seen, to
omit existing powers, and find the aim in some
remote accomplishment or responsibility. In
general,

07:51 AM 1. The Natureof an Aim. (13/18) 25.2%

adequate interplay of experiences—the more
action tends to become routine on the part of the
class at a disadvantage, and capricious, aimless,
and explosive on the part of the class having the
materially fortunate position. Plato defined a
slave as one who accepts from another the
purposes which control his conduct. This
condition obtains even where there is no slavery
in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are
engaged in activity which is socially serviceable,
but whose service they do not understand and
have no personal interest in. Much is said about
scientific management of work. It is a narrow
view which restricts the science which secures
efficiency of operation to movements of the
muscles. The chief opportunity for science is the
discovery of the relations of a man to his work—
including his relations to others who take part—
which will enlist his intelligent interest in what
he is doing. Efficiency in production often
demands division of labor. But it is reduced to a
mechanical routine unless workers see the
technical, intellectual, and social relationships
involved in what they do, and engage in their
work because of the motivation furnished by
such perceptions. The tendency to reduce such
things as efficiency of activity and scientific
management to purely technical externals is
evidence of the one-sided stimulation of thought
given to those in control of industry—those who
supply its aims. Because of their lack of all-round
and well-balanced social

07:43 AM Chapter Seven: The-Educatjon (7/30) 23.2%

perfunctory and superficial where there is no
interest. Parents and teachers often complain—
and correctly—that children "do not want to hear,
or want to understand." Their minds are not upon
the subject precisely because it does not touch
them; it does not enter into their concerns. This is
a state of things that needs to be remedied, but
the remedy is not in the use of methods which
increase indifference and aversion. Even
punishing a child for inattention is one way of
trying to make him realize that the matter is not a
thing of complete unconcern; it is one way of
arousing "interest," or bringing about a sense of
connection. In the long run, its value is measured
by whether it supplies a mere physical excitation
to act in the way desired by the adult or whether
it leads the child "to think"—that is, to reflect
upon his acts and impregnate them with aims.
(ii) That interest is requisite for executive
persistence is even more obvious. Employers do
not advertise for workmen who are not interested
in what they are doing. If one were engaging a
lawyer or a doctor, it would never occur to one to
reason that the person engaged would stick to his
work more conscientiously if it was so
uncongenial to him that he did it merely from a
sense of obligation. Interest measures—or rather
is—the depth of the grip which the foreseen end
has upon one, moving one to act for its
realization.
2. The Importance of the Idea of Interest
in

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to it laden with the spoils of the past. A mind that
is adequately sensitive to the needs and occasions
of the present actuality will have the liveliest of
motives for interest in the background of the
present, and will never have to hunt for a way
back because it will never have lost connection.
3. Education as Reconstruction. In its
contrast with the ideas both of unfolding of
latent powers from within, and of the formation
from without, whether by physical nature or by
the cultural products of the past, the ideal of
growth results in the conception that education
is a constant reorganizing or reconstructing of
experience. It has all the thne an immediate end,
and so far as activity is educative, it reaches that
end—the direct transformation of the quality of
experience. Infancy, youth, adult life,—all stand
on the same educative level in the sense that
what is really learned at any and every stage of
experience constitutes the value of that
experience, and in the sense that it is the chief
business of life at every point to make living
thus contribute to an enrichment ofits own
perceptible meaning.
We thus reach a technical definition of
education: It is that reconstruction or
reorganization of experience which adds to the
meaning of experience, and which increases
ability to direct the course of subsequent
experience. (1) The increment of meaning
corresponds to the increased perception of the

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AM (13/18)
Much which has been said so far is borrowed
from what Plato first consciously taught the
world. But conditions which he could not
intellectually control led him to restrict these
ideas in their application. He never got any
conception of the indefinite plurality of activities
which may characterize an individual and a
social group, and consequently limited his view
to a limited number of classes of capacities and
of social arrangements. Plato's starting point is
that the organization of society depends
ultimately upon knowledge of the end of
existence. If we do not know its end, we shall be
at the mercy of accident and caprice. Unless we
know the end, the good, we shall have no
criterion for rationally deciding what the
possibilities are which should be promoted, nor
how social arrangements are to be ordered. We
shall have no conception of the proper limits and
distribution of activities—what he called justice
—as a trait of both individual and social
organization. But how is the knowledge of the
final and permanent good to be achieved? In
dealing with this question we come upon the
seemingly insuperable obstacle that such
knowledge is not possible save in a just and
harmonious social order. Everywhere else the
mind is distracted and misled by false valuations
and false perspectives. A disorganized and
factional society sets up a number of different
models and standards. Under such conditions it is
impossible for the individual to attain
consistency

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 07:44 The.Education 23.5%
importance ofwhat has been taught consists in its
availability for further teaching, reflects the
pedagogue's view of life. The philosophy is
eloquent about the duty of the teacher in
instructing pupils; it is almost silent regarding his
privilege of learning. It emphasizes the influence
of intellectual environment upon the mind; it
slurs over the fact that the environment involves
a personal sharing in common experiences. It
exaggerates beyond reason the possibilities of
consciously formulated and used methods, and
underestimates the role of vital, unconscious,
attitudes. It insists upon the old, the past, and
passes lightly over the operation of the genuinely
novel and unforeseeable. It takes, in brief,
everything educational into account save its
essence,—vital energy seeking opportunity for
effective exercise. All education forms character,
mental and moral, but formation consists in the
selection and coordination of native activities so
that they may utilize the subject matter of the
social environment. Moreover, the formation is
not only a formation of native activities, but it
takes place through them. It is a process of
reconstruction, reorganization.

2. Education as Recapitulation and

Retrospection. A peculiar combination of the
ideas of development and formation from
without has given rise to the recapitulation theory
of education, biological and cultural. The
individual

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AM (13/18)
differences of endowment the dynamic values of
natural inequalities of growth, and utilize them,
preferring irregularity to the rounding out gained
by pruning will most closely follow that which
takes place in the body and thus prove most
effective." 1 Observation of natural tendencies is
difficult under conditions of restraint. They show
themselves most readily in a child's spontaneous
sayings and doings,—that is, in those he engages
in when not put at set tasks and when not aware
of being under observation. It does not follow
that these tendencies are all desirable because
they are natural; but it does follow that since they
are there, they are operative and must be taken
account of. We must see to it that the desirable
ones have an environment which keeps them
active, and that their activity shall control the
direction the others take and thereby induce the
disuse of the latter because they lead to nothing.
Many tendencies that trouble parents when they
appear are likely to be transitory, and sometimes
too much direct attention to them only fixes a
child's attention upon them. At all events, adults
too easily assume their own habits and wishes as
standards, and regard all deviations of children's
impulses as evils to be eliminated. That
artificiality against which the conception of
following nature is so largely a protest, is the
outcome of attempts to force children directly
into the mold of grown-up standards.

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 07:56 Nine Natw.y as Aims (10/21) 26.6%
instead of with the spirit and meaning of activity,
culture is opposed to efficiency. Whether called
culture or complete development of personality,
the outcome is identical with the true meaning of
social efficiency whenever attention is given to
what is unique in an individual—and he would
not be an individual if there were not something
incommensurable about him. Its opposite is the
mediocre, the average. Whenever distinctive
quality is developed, distinction of personality
results, and with it greater promise for a social
service which goes beyond the supply in quantity
of material commodities. For how can there be a
society really worth serving unless it is
constituted of individuals of significant personal
qualities?
The fact is that the opposition of high worth of
personality to social efficiency is a product of a
feudally organized society with its rigcl division
of inferior and superior. The latter are supposed
to have time and opportunity to develop
themselves as human beings; the former are
confined to providing external products. When
social efficiency as measured by product or
output is urged as an ideal in a would-be
democratic society, it means that the depreciatory
estimate of the masses characteristic of an
aristocratic community is accepted and carried
over. But if democracy has a moral and ideal
meaning, it is that a social return be demanded
from all and
 07:57 Nine Natw.y as Aims (18/21) 27.0%
lived in a dumb unsocial environment where men
refused to talk to one another and used only that
minimum of gestures without which they could
not get along, vocal language would be as
unachieved by him as if he had no vocal organs.
If the sounds which he makes occur in a medium
of persons speaking the Chinese language, the
activities which make like sounds will be
selected and coordinated. This illustration may
be applied to the entire range of the educability
of any individual. It places the heritage from the
past in its right connection with the demands and
opportunities of the present.
(2) The theory that the proper subject matter of
instruction is found in the culture-products of
past ages (either in general, or more specifically
in the particular literatures which were produced
in the culture epoch which is supposed to
correspond with the stage of development of
those taught) affords another instance of that
divorce between the process and product of
growth which has been criticized. To keep the
process alive, to keep it alive in ways which
make it easier to keep it alive in the future, is the
function of educational subject matter. But an
individual can live only in the present. The
present is not just something which comes after
the past; much less something produced by it. It
is what life is in leaving the past behind it. The
study of past products will not help us
understand the present, because the present is

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07:39 AM Sx: Educa-rogressive (11/18) 22.6%
intelligence because, given ready-made, they
must be imposed by some authority external to
intelligence, leaving to the latter nothing but a
mechanical choice of means.
(2) We have spoken as if aims could be
completely formed prior to the attempt to realize
them. This impression must now be qualified.
The aim as it first emerges is a mere tentative
sketch. The act of striving to realize it tests its
worth. If it suffices to direct activity successfully,
nothing more is required, since its whole function
is to set a mark in advance; and at times a mere
hmt may suffice. But usually—at least in
complicated situations—acting upon it brings to
light conditions which had been overlooked. This
calls for revision of the original aim; it has to be
added to and subtracted from. An aim must, then,
be flexible; it must be capable of alteration to
meet circumstances. An end established
externally to the process of action is always rigid.
Being inserted or imposed from without, it is not
supposed to have a working relationship to the
concrete conditions of the situation. What
happens in the course of action neither confirms,
refutes, nor alters it. Such an end can only be
insisted upon. The failure that results from its
lack of adaptation is attributed simply to the
perverseness of conditions, not to the fact that the
end is not reasonable under the circumstances.
The value of a legitimate aim, on the contrary,
lies
 07:49 AM I. The Natureof an Aim. (8/18) 25.0%
involved, but hitherto unperceived. The later
outcome thus reveals the meaning of the earlier,
while the experience as a whole establishes a
bent or disposition toward the things possessing
this meaning. Every such continuous experience
or activity is educative, and all education resides
in having such experiences.
It remains only to point out (what will receive
more ample attention later) that the
reconstruction of experience may be social as
well as personal. For purposes of simplification
we have spoken in the earlier chapters somewhat
as if the education of the immature which fills
them with the spirit of the social group to which
they belong, were a sort of catching up of the
child with the aptitudes and resources of the adult
group. In static societies, societies which make
the maintenance of established custom their
measure of value, this conception applies in the
main. But not in progressive communities. They
endeavor to shape the experiences of the young
so that instead of reproducing current habits,
better habits shall be formed, and thus the future
adult society be an improvement on their own.
Men have long had some intimation of the extent
to which education may be consciously used to
eliminate obvious social evils through starting the
young on paths which shall not produce these
ills, and some idea of the extent in which
education may be made an instrument of
realizing the
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